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HERBLOCK SPECIAL REPORT by Herbert Block

HERBLOCK SPECIAL REPORT

By

Pub Date: Nov. 15th, 1974
ISBN: 039300838X
Publisher: Norton

How much time have you got?"" was always Herblock's throw-away line whenever anyone wanted to explain what he thought was wrong with Nixon -- as though this self-proclaimed long-time anti-Nixonite hadn't been answering just that question with his cartoons ever since the former President's congressional days. And the opening drawing here is his comment on a 1948 Mundt-Nixon anti-Communist bill (defeated, even if it did carry the sponsorship of the then popular Committee on Un-American Activities): the Statue of Liberty is tied to a stake as Pilgrims gather firewood -- ""We got to burn the evil spirits out of her."" The last one notes the Pardon: "". . .I, as President, have the Constitutional power to firmly shut and seal this book"" as President Ford scurries to tape Undisclosed Facts. Nixonites, explains Herblock, have traditionally had what he calls the Multiple Bad Things Advantage -- how could critics ever begin to articulare all the things that were bad about the man without sounding (and they did) too diffuse? So, instead, Herblock spent the years zeroing in with his pen -- and if his text on those decades doesn't have quite the same bite as the accompanying 450 cartoons, what it does have is the pain of the bitten.